critical animals; tina; 2009

see the full this is not art program here

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Thursday Oct 2: 9.00 – 9.30
City Hall Hunter Room
Forum

CRITICAL ANIMALS WELCOME
Come & meet fellow Critical Animals & make a home in our nest for the next three days. Tea, bickies & introductions.

Facilitators: Astrid Lorange and Britt Guy

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Thursday Oct 2: 9.30 – 11.00
City Hall Hunter Room
Panel

ARCHIVES, COLLECTIONS & IMAGINED HISTORIES
A discussion on the processes, techniques & eccentricities of the artistic archive & collections. The preservation of a local zine history, the fetishised curiosities of Post-It notes hidden in library books & the secret, mythologised collections of the unknown subject.

Facilitator: Tiffany Hambley
Featuring: Jessie Lymn, Astrid Woods-Joyce, Britt Guy

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Thursday Oct 2: 11.30 – 13.00
City Hall Hunter Room
Artist Presentation

PATHOLOGIES OF CIVILISATION
A matter & fact panel on how progress is killing us. Three papers track the gratuitous, invidious or unwitting violence of the civilised: the habitat of YouTube, bottled water & militant heirloom gardening.

Facilitator: Nick Keys
Featuring: Patrick Jones, Meg Ulman, Peter O’Mara

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Thursday Oct 2: 14.00 – 15.30
City Hall Hunter Room
Artist Presentation

A POETICS: QUIDDITY, CONTEMPORANEITY & ‘THINGITUDE’ IN AUSTRALIAN POETRY
A radical history in three papers: experimental, pre-Malley Australian poetry with Michael Farrell; notions of failure in the work of Christopher Brennan & Michael Dransfield with Derek Motion; & catachresis in Gig Ryan’s poetics with Sam Langer.

Facilitator: Astrid Lorange
Featuring: Michael Farrell, Derek Motion, Sam Langer

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Thursday Oct 2: 16.00 – 17.30
City Hall Hunter Room
Performance

THE WANDERER
A collective performance of Christopher Brennan’s most well-known sequence of poems, ‘The Wanderer’. Fourteen writers will each be reading a part of the sequence followed by their own creative response. The performance will question the creative ’self’ functioning within poetry. But it will not be an isolated quest & this is where the difference lies. At stake are issues not local to one particular ego. And therefore: what is the nature of a poetic ‘performance’? Are there answers?

Facilitator: Derek Motion
Featuring: Ivy Alvarez, Fiona Wright, Patrick Jones, Kate Fagan, Michael Farrell, Nick Keys, Tara Mokhtari, Peter O’Mara, Tim Wright, Jenna Gill, Astrid Lorange, Nathan Curnow, Tom Lee, Derek Motion

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Thursday Oct 2: 23.00 – 24.00
Lock-Up Exercise Yard
Reading

THE GHOST POETRY PROJECT: A LATE-NIGHT HAUNTING
“Language is how ghosts enter the world.” Nathan Curnow reads from his Ghost Poetry Project, a collection of poems he composed during nights spent in haunted spaces. His poems play with the sensuality of masochism, the memories of his childhood night paralysis & the project of the poetic ‘I’. Meet outside Festival Club 22.30 to walk in convoy to the Lock-up.

Featuring: Nathan Curnow

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Friday Oct 3: 9.00 – 10.00
Uni House Round Theatrette
Reading

BREAKFAST READING: COFFEE, CROISSANTS & POETRY
Michael Farrell, one of Australia’s most interesting experimental poets, reads from his newly published collection, a raiders guide, joined by fellow Melbourne poet, Sam Langer. Come & join this breakfast reading with a coffee, croissant & some radical language innovation.

Facilitator: Astrid Lorange
Featuring: Michael Farrell and Sam Langer

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Friday Oct 3: 10.30 – 12.00
City Hall Hunter Room
Panel

FEMINISM, AESTHETICS & THE BODY
Three artists engage in various nuances of feminist discourse: the woman in literature, postfeminism, queer verse, the comic woman, the female body, motherhood & the performances of gender.

Facilitator: Sarah-Jane Norman
Featuring: Holly Zwalf, Toni Bartlett, Miriam Hall

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Friday Oct 3: 13.00 – 14.30
City Hall Hunter Room
Panel

AGE, SEX & THE NEGOTIATION OF SELVES
A discussion about sexuality, gender performance, age & the experience of the self: Educational institutions, the academy, masochism, paralysis & the many negotiations of the self in the artistic project.

Facilitator: Miriam Hall
Featuring: Ianto Ware, Emma Elita, Nathan Curnow

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Friday Oct 3: 15.00 – 16.30
City Hall Hunter Room
Presentation

CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS & THE SPACES BETWEEN
Contemporary artists talk about their work: installation, experimental film and performance converse with the experiences of the everyday. The dialogue transcends the traditional, aiming to open up notions of art, thought & experience, to engage with a wider narrative.

Facilitator: Britt Guy
Featuring: Renee Tamayo, Nicolas Vogelpoel, Sarah-Jane Norman

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Friday Oct 3: 17.00 – 18.30
City Hall Hunter Room
Panel

COLLECTIVITY, COLLABORATION & SOLITUDE
A conversation about the various compositional tensions of collaboration & solitude. Artists discuss the nature of collaboration & talk about collectively composed works, as well as the solitary project & the curious experience of the ‘hermetic closet’.

Facilitator: Tiffany Hambley
Featuring: Jane Kreis, Janet Starr, Jane Naylor, Christelle Davis

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Friday Oct 3: 17.30 – 18.30
Lock-Up Exercise Yard
Special Event

BOOK LAUNCH: HOW TO DO WORDS WITH THINGS
Patrick Jones & Peter O’Mara launch their new collaborative publication, How to Do Words with Things. The book – printed on wood-free paper with vegetable inks – is in two parts. Jones will read from his ‘Freedragging Manifesto’, an exploration of slow text, pop-fascism & the compositional process of chance procedures. O’Mara will read from ’subtext’, a collection of work focused on intermedia environments for word & image.

Facilitator: Nick Keys
Featuring: Patrick Jones, Peter O’Mara

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Friday Oct 3: 21.00 – 23.30
View Factory
Special Event

EVEN BOOKS PRESENTS: SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE
LISTEN: Come unstuck in time as Even Books and a particularly trixy tribute band re-enact the interactive Slaughterhouse 5 show! Part musical, part actor-action, part audience jumping about, part porn, it was written by proto-seminal band The Colors, in rumoured collaboration with Kurt Vonnegut himself. Get reading in preparation for a night of time-travel and other treats. Poo-tee-weet …

Facilitators: Angela Bennetts and Alice Fenton

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Saturday Oct 4: 10.00 – 11.30
City Hall Banquet Room
Panel

RADICAL METHODOLOGY, DECONTEXTUALISATION, BROCOLAGE & (UN)CREATIVE PRACTICE
A discussion on the dynamic practices of the artist-as-researcher. Non-traditional methodology is investigated in terms of multiple, convergent, contiguous & anarchic discourses that gather together across creative inquiries. Also noting the role of traditional quantitative & qualitative forms, while maybe considering a guerilla make over.

Facilitator: Britt Guy
Featuring: Anna Cooke, Linda Neil, Caroline Vains

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Saturday Oct 4: 12.00 – 13.00
City Hall Banquet Room
Presentation

MAPPING A POETICS OF SPACE: PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY, LIVED CITIES & REMEMBERED CITIES
Two papers explore the spatial dimensions of theory. One looks at the confusion & partiality of contemporary Rome, while the other uses the Situationists’ derive to produce an interactive, psychogeographic map of the shopper in the city.

Facilitator: Astrid Lorange
Featuring: Caroline Vains, Olivia Hamilton

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Saturday Oct 4: 14.00 – 15.30
City Hall Banquet Room
Performance

TIMEKEEPER ZERO
An experimental discussion/performance. A timekeeper issues small pockets of chance-generated air-time in an unknown order, with wildcard entries for voluntary improvisers. Time is used to meditate on the notion of poetics: its materiality and performativity. Drawing on the chance operations of John Cage and Jackson Mac Low, this dodecahedron of poetics will embrace the indeterminacy of ‘now’.

Facilitators: Michael Farrell and Astrid Lorange

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Saturday Oct 4: 16.00 – 17.00
City Hall Banquet Room
Presentation

DE-MYSTIFYING CREATIVITY
A joint paper looking at the nature of creativity and cultural production. The discussion will investigate the myths and realities surrounding creativity.

Facilitator: Tiffany Hambley
Featuring: Chloe Russell, Sarah Coffee

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Saturday Oct 4: 18.00 – 19.00
View Factory
Special Event

SWAMP E-ZINE LAUNCH
SWAMP is an online zine for Creative Writing Post Grads – a new publication brought to you by the Creative Writing Post Graduate Workshop of the University of Newcastle. Join us as we officially launch this new e-zine with readings from some of the best new writers featured in our first two issues of SWAMP.

Facilitator: Patrick Bryson

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Saturday Oct 4: 19.00 – 20.30
City Hall Banquet Room
Performance

LANDSCAPING AESTHETICS: A COLLECTIVE CONVERSATION
Artists in an experimental collaborative conversation, talking across the boundaries & textures of art, poetry, performance, film, theory & the aesthetics of experience. Allowing artists to talk in the language that they think in, their artform.

Facilitator: Britt Guy
Featuring: Renee Tamayo, Jane Kreis, Astrid Joyce-Woods, Nicolas Vogelpoel, Lauren Clelland, Ivy Alvarez

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Friday and Saturday: 12.00 – 17.00
Playhouse Foyer
Installation

FACE-LIFT
A video installation from a Masters project, ‘Divine Martyr’. A face-lift is performed on a dead pig’s head, in parody of contemporary cosmetic culture. The video face-lift is experienced in a hospital-room installation. The project looks at ancient & modern notions of the martyr.

Artist: Renee Tamayo

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Thursday to Monday: 24 hours
Playhouse Window Box
Installation

PRODUCT PLACEMENT
‘Product Placement’ explores the overwhelming & intimidating power of surveillance. ‘Product Placement’ is an installation consisting of rough transformation of domestic objects into ‘spy devices’ that capture an audience member walking into an installation & responding to the visual experience.

Artist: Astrid Woods-Joyce

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Thursday to Monday 12.00 – 18.00
Staple Manor
Installation

THE ROPE DANCER ACCOMPANIES HERSELF WITH HER SHADOWS, REVISITED. (2008)
A carousel of sharpened pencils, sharp shadow & nauseating movement. Materials used: Wood, metal, 604 HB pencils, Tigers Tail & threaded rod.

Artist: Miriam Chatt

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Friday, Saturday Sunday: 13.00 – 15.00
Civic Park
Performance/Installation

THE EKPHRASTIC AGENCY
A free art customisation service for all: The Ekphrastic Agency, a mobile office, specialises in boosting its clientele’s cultural credibility by carefully selecting & matching an artist’s practice to the client. The client then has custodianship of this information for the period of one month, & can describe the artist’s work to others at dinner parties, morning teas, bus queues or just ponder for quiet reflection & personal enrichment. Conversation starters are supplied in clients’ kits.

Featuring: Jane Naylor